Ray Ison, Professor in Systems at the UK Open University since 1994, is a member of the Applied Systems Thinking in Practice Group. From 2008-15 he also developed and ran the Systemic Governance Research Program at Monash University, Melbourne. In this blog he reflects on contemporary issues from a systemic perspective.

Saturday, July 26, 2014

Australia's first ever Community Energy Congress was held recently in Canberra (16-17th June). As the web site indicates their ambitious, but appropriate aim was to 'to create a new approach to energy in Australia – to decarbonise, decentralise and democratise our energy system!'. With this in mind they set out to design what I would call a governance experiment that combines systemic practices and institutional innovations:

"The Coalition for Community Energy (C4CE) is a purpose-built
governance system designed to enable collaboration for the purpose of
creating a vibrant community energy sector and movement right across
Australia.

It is the membership of
C4CE ~ community energy projects, groups, support organisations and
stakeholders in the wider renewable and mainstream energy system ~ who
make this vision possible. C4CE initiatives are created and led by one of more members. The overall coordination of C4CE is led by the Steering Group with the support of a Secretariat.

C4CE believes collaboration creates greater impact than the simple
sum of individual member efforts. Together, we can make the difference.

C4CE’s objectives are to:

Guide and support development of the community energy sector

Create a coordinated voice to better advocate for the needs of the sector

Further to my earlier post, colleagues concerned like me, at the continuing systemic failure of governance and public policy have alerted me to intelligent and insightful arguments that point to other ways of understanding and governing. If only these understandings and associated practices could prevail!

Continuing with the complex, contested issue of Palestine - Israel, an article in the New Yorker on July 25, 2014, entitled 'Israel’s Other War' by Etgar Keret draws attention to the longer term systemic consequences of Israeli policy. "It’s an awful thing to make a truly tragic mistake, one
that costs many lives. It’s worse to make that same mistake over and
over again. Four operations in Gaza, an immense number of Israeli and
Palestinian hearts that have stopped beating, and we keep ending up in
the same place. The only thing that actually changes is Israeli
society’s tolerance for criticism. It’s become clear during this
operation that the right wing has lost its patience in all matters
regarding that elusive term, “freedom of speech.” In the past two weeks,
we’ve seen right wingers beating left wingers with clubs, Facebook
messages promising to send left-wing activists to the gas chambers, and
denunciations of anyone whose opinion delays the military on its way to
victory. It turns out that this bloody road we walk from operation to
operation is not as cyclical as we may have once thought. This road is
not a circle, it’s a downward spiral, leading to new lows, which, I’m
sad to say, we’ll be unlucky enough to experience."

Writing in the Toronto Star, Gabor Maté (published on Tue Jul 22 2014) captures the disillusionment for many now in their 60s and 70s, like me, who grew up supportive of the ideal of a democratic Israeli state - an ideal that no longer survives in a defensible form. He writes:

"As a Jewish youngster
growing up in Budapest, an infant survivor of the Nazi genocide, I was
for years haunted by a question resounding in my brain with such force
that sometimes my head would spin: “How was it possible? How could the
world have let such horrors happen?”

It was a naïve
question, that of a child. I know better now: such is reality. Whether
in Vietnam or Rwanda or Syria, humanity stands by either complicitly or
unconsciously or helplessly, as it always does. In Gaza today we find
ways of justifying the bombing of hospitals, the annihilation of
families at dinner, the killing of pre-adolescents playing soccer on a
beach.

In Israel-Palestine
the powerful party has succeeded in painting itself as the victim, while
the ones being killed and maimed become the perpetrators. “They don’t
care about life,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says,
abetted by the Obamas and Harpers of this world, “we do.” Netanyahu, you
who with surgical precision slaughter innocents, the young and the old,
you who have cruelly blockaded Gaza for years, starving it of
necessities, you who deprive Palestinians of more and more of their
land, their water, their crops, their trees — you care about life?"

There is, unfortunately, no shortage of contemporary contexts in which ideologues drive us collectively in the wrong direction. Profound systemic consequences are already evident in Sri Lanka, Canada and Australia as these links testify.On a rare positive note the British government is to be commended for sticking to its carbon reduction targets, as indicated by this announcement from the Secretary of State, who said:

"Above all, maintaining the Fourth Carbon Budget at its current level
demonstrates the UK’s commitment to its climate change target of an 80%
reduction in emissions by 2050. The UK has the world’s most transparent
system of binding emission reduction targets, which are used as a model
throughout the world. Today’s decision cements the UK’s place as a
global leader in combating climate change, which will allow us to play a
central role in delivering a global deal to combat climate change at
the end of 2015." As I have written elsewhere the UK's 'Committee on Climate Change' is an important institutional innovation - so it is good to see that its role in governance is working. Importantly this case exemplifies how, when there is political commitment to what is ethically and scientificaly justifiable, it is possible to stand up to Treasury idealogues, as this article by Simon Inglethorpe indicates:

"The decision amounts to a personal victory for
[Secretary of State] Davey as it means Treasury calls to weaken the budget – and leave the
door open for more gas-fired electricity generation in future – have not
prevailed.

“Ed Davey deserves praise for standing up to the
Treasury’s wrecking efforts, and the prime minister credit for holding
firm on this crucial commitment,” said Greenpeace’s political director,
Ruth Davis. “George Osborne has done everything
in his power to water down the UK’s keystone climate change policy,
putting at risk vital investment in our energy system and our
credibility in global climate negotiations.”

I imagine it is too much to hope that a moratorium on all fracking will emerge as a systemically desirable national strategy - in the UK and elsewhere. Technologies which perpetuate 'carbon pollution' and attract investment away from renewables have no place in the world we now have to create.

The decision maker of today is faced with a complex world
composed of many open, value-laden, multi-level, multi-component
systems, situated in turbulent, unstable, and changing environments.
When a plane crash in eastern Ukraine with 298 people aboard will
affect the European gas supply, health care for AIDS patients, the
decisions of the UN Security Council, and international sanctions --
which will then alter trading on the NYSE, world trading partnerships,
British real estate prices and the American economy -- that complexity
seems both obvious and paralyzing.

Complexity is the
source of very difficult scientific challenges for observing,
understanding, reconstructing and predicting the multi-dimensional
dynamics of present-day systems. Cybernetics is the science of reflexive
constraints in systems consisting of many participants -- all of whom
observe, decide, act, observe, etc. It examines the role of context and
assumptions which together help shape the understanding of both problems
and their potential solutions.

When what is happening
in your world doesn't make sense, when it doesn't conform to your
beliefs about how things work, it's time to ask hard questions.
Cybernetics is the science of developing those questions by examining
both the situation and the people and institutions charged with
achieving adequate management, regulation or control.

While
the hard sciences may suggest that decision makers consider all the
information they can about both the current situation and the past, and
then with a sense of desired outcomes, lay plans of action to get to
those outcomes, cybernetics exposes the “wishful thinking” this entails.
Cybernetics questions our ability to rely on "predictive" models by
noting the blinders built into the models themselves.

We
bring into our decision-making process flaws and errors of our own. All
of us show bias when it comes to what information we take in. We
typically focus on anything that agrees with our view of the world and
the outcome we want. We need to acknowledge our tendency to incorrectly
process challenging news and actively push ourselves to hear that which
fails to match our prior expectations.

Cybernetics
helps you develop the very questions you should ask of both yourself
and of the situation you are examining. It highlights the pitfalls when
one attempts to understand the whole as a "black box." The view of
that crash from Donetsk differs greatly from the view in Iowa City.

Cybernetics
highlights the constraints as you map and parameterize inputs and
outputs, and as you observe systemic behaviors. Most importantly, it
demands reflective questioning when you decompose the system into its
constituent subsystems, recursively, until you think you have reached a
natural stopping place for decision-making. Such questioning may, for
example, help guide British policy toward Russian banking sanctions.

In
order to deal properly with the diversity of problems the world throws
at you, you need to have a repertoire of responses which is (at least)
as nuanced as the problems you face. Cybernetics should be part of your
repertoire."

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

I am posting a recent communication from Avaatz because I could not elucidate the systemic issues any better.

"As a new round of violence kicks off in Israel-Palestine and more children are killed, it's not enough just to call for another ceasefire. It's time to take definitive non-violent action to end this decades long nightmare. Our governments have failed -- while they have talked peace and passed
UN resolutions, they and our companies have continued to aid, trade and
invest in the violence. The only way to stop this hellish cycle of
Israel confiscating Palestinian lands, daily collective punishment of
innocent Palestinian families, Hamas firing rockets, and Israel bombing
Gaza is to make the economic cost of this conflict too high to bear.We know it works -- when EU countries issued guidelines not to
fund the illegal Israeli settlements it caused an earthquake in the
cabinet, and when citizens successfully persuaded a Dutch pension fund,
PGGM, to withdraw, it created a political storm.
This may not feel like a direct way to stop the current killing, but
history tells us that raising the financial cost of oppression can pave a
path to peace. Click to call on 6 key banks, pension funds and businesses to pull out
-- If we all take smart action now and turn up the heat, they could
withdraw, the Israeli economy will take a hit, and we can turn the
calculation of the extremists politically profiting from this hell
upside down:
https://secure.avaaz.org/en/israel_palestine_this_is_how_it_ends_rb/?bPnBtgb&v=42735In the last six weeks three Israeli teenagers were murdered in the West
Bank, a Palestinian boy was burnt alive, an American kid was brutally
beaten up by Israeli police, and now almost 100 Gazan kids have died in
Israeli air strikes.
This is not the "Middle East conflict", it's becoming a war on children. And we are becoming numb to this global shame.

The media makes out like this is an intractable conflict between two
equal warring parties, but it is not. Palestinian extremists' attacks on
innocent civilians are never justified and Hamas’ anti-semitism is
disgusting. But these extremists claim legitimacy by fighting the
grotesque, decades-long oppression by the Israeli state. Israel
currently occupies, colonises, bombs, raids, and controls the water,
trade and the borders of a legally free nation that has been recognised
by the United Nations. In Gaza, Israel has created the largest open-air
prison in the world, and then blockaded it. Now as bombs fall, the
families literally have no way to get out.

These are war crimes and we wouldn't accept that anywhere else: why
accept it in Palestine? Half a century ago Israel and its Arab
neighbours went to war and Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza.
Occupying territory after war happens all the time. But no military
occupation should turn into a decades-long tyranny which only fuels and
benefits extremists who use terror to target the innocent. And who suffers? The majority of loving families on both sides that just want freedom and peace.

To many, particularly in Europe and North America, calling for companies
to withdraw investments from financing or taking part in Israel's
occupation of Palestine sounds completely biased. But this campaign is
not anti-Israel -- this is the most potent non-violent strategy to end the ritual violence, ensure Israelis' security and achieve Palestinian freedom. Although
Hamas deserves much pressure too, it is already under crippling
sanctions and facing every kind of pressure. Israel's power and wealth
dwarfs Palestine, and if it refuses to end its illegal occupation, the
world must act to make the cost unbearable.

Dutch pension fund ABP invests in Israeli banks that help fund the colonisation of Palestine.
Massive banks like Barclays invest in suppliers of Israeli arms and
other occupation businesses. Computer giant Hewlett-Packard supplies
sophisticated surveillance to control the movement of Palestinians. And Caterpillar provides bulldozers that are used to demolish Palestinian homes and farms.
If we can create the biggest global call ever to get these companies to
pull out, we will show clearly that the world will no longer be
complicit in this bloodshed. The Palestinian people are calling on the world to support this path and progressive Israelis support it too. Let's join them:

Our community has worked to bring peace, hope, and change to some of the
world's toughest conflicts, and often that means taking difficult
positions to address the root cause. For years our community has looked
for a political solution to this nightmare, but with this new round of
horror unfolding in Gaza, the time has come to turn to sanctions and
disinvestment to finally help end the horror for Israelis and
Palestinians.